The Best Actress Oscar occasioned the last act of the long-running feud between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. They had starred together for the first time in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, a surprise hit the previous summer. Davis was nominated for her role as the title character, a faded child star who humiliates the wheelchair-bound sister who eclipsed her fame in adulthood, while Crawford was not.[1]

Crawford told the other nominated actresses that, as a courtesy, she would accept their awards for them should they be unavailable on the night of the ceremony. Davis did not object as her rival had often done this, but on the night of the ceremony she was livid when Crawford took the stage to cheerfully accept the award on behalf of Anne Bancroft, who had a Broadway commitment. Davis believed that Crawford had told other Oscar voters to vote for the Miracle Worker star in order to upstage her. The rekindled animosity between the two resulted in Crawford leaving the cast of Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte, a planned followup to Baby Jane that began filming the next summer, early in production; she would never take any major roles again.[1]

A^ : During pre-production on Lawrence of Arabia, producer Sam Spiegel and director David Lean were unhappy with Michael Wilson's original screenplay, so Spiegel asked playwright Robert Bolt to rewrite the script, as Spiegel wanted to get the film rights of Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons. Bolt found the script lacking in good dialogue and also character depth. He essentially wrote the whole script, using T.E. Lawrence's book, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, as his starting point. While Bolt rewrote the whole script, he still retained the characterization of all of the characters found in Wilson's original script. It was decided that Bolt would be credited as the sole writer of Lawrence of Arabia and not Wilson, because he was blacklisted at the time. The nomination for Wilson was granted on September 26, 1995, by the Academy Board of Directors, after research at the WGA found that the then-blacklisted writer shared the screenwriting credit with Bolt.

‡ Dates and years listed for each ceremony were the eligibility period of film release in Los Angeles County. For the first five ceremonies, the eligibility period was done on a seasonal basis, from August to July. For the 6th ceremony, held in 1934, the eligibility period lasted from August 1, 1932 to December 31, 1933. Since the 7th ceremony held in 1935, the period of eligibility became the full previous calendar year from January 1 to December 31.